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The return of the Spadina Expressway?

Mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi says he would build a tunnel from the south end of the Allen Expressway into the downtown core.

Rocco Rossi's plan to create a traffic tunnel to downtown Toronto is reminiscent of a plan to extend the Allen Expressway above-ground as the Spadina Expressway that sparked a huge battle in the late 1960s and was eventually cancelled. (Tony Bock / Toronto Star)

Rocco Rossi’s latest attention-grabbing promise is to extend the Allen Expressway underground all the way to the Gardiner Expressway, complete with a subterranean bike lane.

Rossi said Monday that, if he is elected Toronto mayor Oct. 25, his four-year term would include the start of construction on an 8-kilometre “Toronto Tunnel” toll road starting where the Allen ends at Eglinton Ave. W.

With no defined route or price tag offered — Rossi guesses about $110 million a kilometre but says engineers would quickly figure out the details — critics slammed the audacious idea as “insane,” a giant financial sinkhole and a late April Fool’s joke.

“With advances in (tunneling) technology, I think we’re at a stage where 8 kilometres from the Allen to the Gardiner is within our grasp,” Rossi said in an interview.

Rossi said the megaproject would jump-start Toronto’s economic growth, reduce gridlock and encourage businesses to return to the downtown core.

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“Companies and workers would rather establish in the 905 than fight their way into downtown Toronto every day,” said Rossi. “I want our kids to have a chance to live and work at good jobs in the city of Toronto.”

His audacious plan — to be financed, he said, through a public-private partnership — essentially resurrects, underground, a project cancelled nearly 40 years ago.

Plans to continue the Allen above-ground as the Spadina Expressway all the way to Spadina and Harbord St. sparked a huge battle in the late 1960s, culminating with cancellation of the project by then-premier Bill Davis in June 1971.

Rossi’s plan assumes that burying the expressway’s new incarnation would largely negate the old complaints that a new route would destroy neighbourhoods and boost noise and pollution.

Councillor Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina) called Rossi’s tunnel one of the strangest, most absurd ideas he has heard.

The tunnel would have to be built under the existing subway tunnel, while entry and exit points would require building traffic cloverleafs and therefore the demolition of parts of downtown, he said.

“You would have to bomb the downtown core and find another $30 billion or $40 billion to build it,” said Vaughan, whose late father, Colin Vaughan, successfully campaigned against the Spadina Expressway.

The city needs to concentrate on building “affordable rapid transit, which cleans the air and connects all of Toronto,” Pantalone said. “My plan to finish Transit City’s European-style rail network will do that. Mr. Rossi’s idea would put us on the road to congestion, and literally leave Torontonians in the dark.”

Fellow candidate George Smitherman said the plan sounded like an April Fool’s joke. “Announcing a plan to mimic Boston’s Big Dig (a 2-mile tunnel that cost $22 billion instead of the expected $4 billion) without any idea how to pay for it, shows the kind of campaign-by-soundbite Mr. Rossi is running.”

Eric Miller, a transportation planner and director of the University of Toronto’s Cities Centre, called the idea “a complete non-starter.” Gridlock on the Gardiner would back up traffic in the tunnel, creating a new bottleneck without adding capacity to the road system, he said.

“It’s not going to move people any faster,” he said. “The only way to seriously reduce congestion on Toronto streets is to get more people on subways, buses and streetcars.”

The Canadian Automobile Association hasn’t endorsed the tunnel idea, but welcomes election proposals aimed at taming Toronto’s notorious gridlock. “We’d be pleased to be part of the discussion” on a new freeway, said regional CAA spokeswoman Faye Lyons.

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